Most Americans – right and left alike – agree that, for some time, Democrats have failed to articulate a coherent, progressive economic vision. Reasonable people might disagree about the substantive merit of the New Deal or the Great Society, but there was never any question that Presidents Roosevelt and Johnson presented voters with clear pictures of how they would steward the American economy.

One reason for this repeated failure is that Republicans have had tremendous success branding progressive economic ideas as class warfare. The term was used with increasing frequency by Reagan against Carter and Mondale, by Bush against Dukakis and Clinton, and by Bush against Gore and Kerry. Democrats have long tried to turn the class warfare tables against Republicans, using the phrase to deride tax cuts favoring the rich over the poor. But the Republican variant, accusing the Democrats of pandering narrowly to low-income voters, remains more salient, perhaps because it suggests a desperate grip on a decades-old economic philosophy.

The competing definitions demonstrate that the battle hinges less on substance than on defining the terms of the debate. In other words, class warfare is not much more than a war of words. Wielded prudently, Jacob Hacker’s articulation of the problem facing the American middle class has the potential to shift the momentum in this battle to progressives.

Hacker relies on the bedrock economic principle that rational actors price risk into their decisions. Even if the American voter is not the homo economicus that traditional economists would have us believe, if Hacker’s data is correct, middle class voters are primed for candidates who seem to understand the uncertainty and volatility that characterize their economic lives. That articulation avoids the familiar pitfall of forgetting that middle class voters don’t resent the rich; they want to be the rich, and feel that, with hard work and a little bit of luck, they can be. Promoting a strong insurance and opportunity society (or security an opportunity society, to use Jon’s term) might allow Democrats to recapture the rhetoric of economic optimism that has been so sorely missing from recent campaigns.